Andrew seems genuinely concerned by the Hawkish positions that Kyrsten has shifted to to get elected and wanted the archived show we have stored Offline (putting all of the old shows back online soon,... part of our upgrading process).

I had a lengthy conversation with Andrew and feel his concerns are real, but what will be done with his research and what he does about his work being misrepresented is the real story,... that's where we come in.

Kyrsten Sinema was interviewed on my show the first week I was on the radio here in The Valley of the Sun on a Scottsdale radio station 2003-02-14. Kyrsten was the primary organizer of an Anti War rally that weekend as an AntiWar activist, now she wants to be elected in Arizona as a... ???) - Well, I sure as hell am not sending something to CNN I wouldn't share with you :)

This month's cover was inspired by the needs of people affected by hurricane Sandy. How might a free people respond to the needs of their neighbors if there wasn't a single thought that there might be a need for a permission slip?

My work in talk radio covering the effects of hurricane Katrina made it very clear that government was incapable of providing for the timely and efficient needs of people better than individuals enthusiastic about helping their neighbors. Immediately after Katrina's devastation was realized, regional fishermen knew that their personal fishing boats would be invaluable in the effort to rescue people on roof tops waving bed sheets spray painted with pleas for help. The world was watching via helicopter news coverage when 500 bass boats showed up in a line over 5 miles long and were turned back by government employees with M16s.

Libertarian liberty activists understood more clearly than most the power of the Internet for at least a decade before the political establishment really caught on during the Howard Dean campaign for POTUS (President of the United States) in 2004. The first national campaign to raise significant money using the Internet launched a frenzy to dominate the new media. But libertarian philosophy had already saturated much of the available traffic via email lists, and open participation on various issues of importance to many (Taxes, Gun Rights, Civil Liberties, Education etc.)

Before the invasion of Iraq in February 2003, I would begin my career in talk radio as the weekday morning host of a talk radio station in Scottsdale, Arizona covering the 'Valley of the Sun'. I remember my first week included a very progressive Green Party activist Kyrsten Sinema http://www.ernesthancock.com/archive/index.cgi?2003-02-14-Ernie that headed up Arizona's part in a massive worldwide demonstration against an Iraq War that had yet to begin. It was reported at the time that there we more people in the streets around the world in opposition to a war that hadn't even started yet than at the height of the Vietnam War. Ironically, I would interview Powell Gammill (now Senior Editor of Freedom's Phoenix) one week later in his capacity as the Lab Manager for the State of Arizona's Terrorist Bio-Defense Department. Kyrsten would later register as a Democrat and eventually win an Arizona State legislative seat, and just this last November was elected to the United States Congress by just over a 1% margin over the Republican, with Powell Gammill getting well over 6% of the vote on a platform of making certain that your vote counted by NOT casting it. I have an interesting and long list of informative interactions with Kyrsten, but it is her use of the AntiWar movement that I wish to make note of here.

It was very clear to me that Kyrsten was a smart progressive that looked to build coalitions for future use as a voting block, to the point that she agreed to welcome armed libertarian participation at the coming antiwar protest. I definitely do not want to give the impression that Kyrsten is "pro 2nd Amendment" (and I am certain she wouldn't want me to), but she definitely knew what it would take for our promoting our participation. Libertarians had previously avoided joining progressive gatherings due to their making a big deal out of the few liberty supporters that chose to exercise their rights to self-defense while exercising their free speech simultaneously. It has continued to be our experience that a few armed protesters kept the peace, and the local police were much more professional. Surprisingly, Kyrsten welcomed our participation under the condition that those that chose to carry their firearms to the antiwar protest would remain unmolested by event organizers. The event drew thousands to a center of the city public park in downtown Phoenix and I am of the opinion that the presence of firearms prevented the mass arrest of many of the less cooperative liberal protesters. This event would flavor the cooperation between progressive and libertarian activists for many years to come. Later, a former Arizona Libertarian Party State Chairman would join with many of the same people in a strong coalition of antiwar activists. He was successful in keeping the focus of the group antiwar instead of the antiwar movement being used in Arizona to further all of the other progressive issues, which was the norm in other parts of the country.

I share this information so that you have a better understanding of what was being experienced elsewhere in the country. During these months, I would interview nationally known figures of all political philosophies on many issues, including foreign policy, and my activist experiences made it clear to me what was going on. Howard Dean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dean was the opposition candidate with the most traction at the time, and as the antiwar candidate was raising lots of money using the Internet and rallying the young to participate in his campaign. An antiwar movement behind a candidate for President at the height of the U.S. invasion of Iraq (March19th 2003 ?" May 1st 2003) could not be tolerated and Dean was targeted by the establishment. The Bush/Kerry choice was acceptable to the establishment just as the Obama/McCain and Obama/Romney were. Howard Dean would later become the Democratic National Chairman in February of 2005.

Preparation for the 2006 mid-term elections would include the antiwar activist and the progressive elements that had joined forces inside the Democratic Party, but were being directed by independent money via various organizations (doesn't matter which ones… if you go high enough on the right side or the left side of the pyramid, you eventually find out that both sides are managed by the same entities). Covering the Camp Casey story as the producer for The Charles Goyette show on the Air America affiliate in Phoenix, AZ, from Crawford, Texas near President Bush's ranch, I got an up close and personal view of the machine in action as Cindy Sheehan refused to bend to the will of the War Machine. It was demanded of Cindy that she no longer advocate for the immediate withdrawal of troops from foreign entanglements, and that she take on the rhetoric of "Phased Withdraw". She was warned that she would be an outcast and that all support from the 'Machine's Left Wing' (of the bird of prey) would evaporate if she wouldn't cooperate, and this is what would happen. The United States House of Representatives would gain a Democratic majority and the first thing that newly elected Speaker Pelosi did was to support the continued funding of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Cindy would attempt to bring these issues to light in her effort to unseat Pelosi in the 2008 election cycle from San Francisco, CA.

It was in Crawford, Texas that I came to understand how the antiwar movement was used to assemble as large a voting block as possible with the inclusion of as many special interests popular on the left as possible. The antiwar movement was nothing more than a tool used by well-placed money to create as large a voting block as possible for the support of a vast increase in the size of government using the progressive rhetoric… but the wars would continue.

The participation of Congressman Ron Paul in the 2008 election cycle prevented a redux of the 2006's efforts to use antiwar rhetoric to gather this voting block in support of the Democrats. The support structure for the antiwar movement wasn't really there to prevent the war, it was part of a much larger agenda to advocate for more government using a block of popular issues appealing to as large a coalition as possible… even libertarian activists with side arms, if it served their immediate interests.

The voting block represented on the right side of the pyramid is mostly made up of the 180 degree version of whatever is advocated by the left side, with as little overlap as possible… to the point of being comical. But don't be fooled into thinking that the overall agenda isn't shared. The bottom line is that you are a debt slave for 'They/Them/Those' that will not leave you alone. But now for the Katrina/Sandy tie in.

At the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and it didn't seem to take much effort to coalesce an effective opposition to the Bush administration's handling of the disaster. Opposition to America's wars, combined with alternative media and additional cable channels, created an environment that could take advantage of almost any misstep by anyone anywhere. And the US government, with the Bush administration at the helm, made it very easy for the American people to vent their anger. But with an even larger hurricane, more war, more drug war, education and infrastructure in shambles, more debt and more surveillance, and less freedom, the Obama administration is enjoying one of the highest approval ratings of his entire presidency. The offer of more freedom as the largest part of a real stimulus package isn't even discussed in Washington D.C. Only Ron Paul, in his last address from the floor of the House of Representatives, has articulated the power of liberty as a cure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q03cWio-zjk

But for Ron Paul and his supporters, the entire election cycle of 2008 was a bipartisan brain washing that provided for the insertion of confusion and doubt from all angles. Thinking back to the 2008 POTUS election cycle, it's hard to recall any role played by President Bush in the 2008 elections. The only memory I have of Bush being a part of the election coverage was when McCain and Obama "suspended" their campaigns to stand shoulder to shoulder to shoulder with Bush when they Nationally Socialized the American economy with the TARP bailout… to be immediately followed weeks into the new Obama administration with more stimulus.

Americans, and the rest of the planet I suspect, barely noticed when Ron Paul and his supporter's efforts to Audit the Fed resulted in the acknowledgement of tens of TRILLIONS of dollars just given away to any and everyone but the American people. But, of course, they got the bill… and their money devalued. When the Secretary of the United States Treasury advocated just last week for the American people to accept the inevitability of unlimited debt increases and perpetual tax slavery for themselves and future generations, did anyone really make a real effort to put up a fuss on the streets of America?... it's just business as usual.

The 'Largest Bank Robbery in Human History', that continues before our eyes, has had long lasting side effects that have yet to be fully understood by those collecting the spoils of corruption and death. Just this week on Freedom's Phoenix' news site, we linked to a DailyBell.com article by Ron Holland, "I Told You So! Of Course Washington will Steal Your Retirement Benefits" http://www.thedailybell.com/28418/Ron-Holland-I-Told-You-So-Of-Course-Washington-will-Steal-Your-Retirement-Benefits where he references an article he wrote in early 2010 published on LewRockwell.com. "The Coming Obama Retirement Trap Has Started" http://www.lewrockwell.com/holland/holland12.1.html. In that article, Ron Holland shares a story about getting a call from Ron Paul explaining how, at the last minute, an amendment was added to the '1981 Economic Recovery Act' that made it clear that Social and Economic engineering of the American people's retirements away from them was well under way. I graduated High School in 1979, but can remember the year "2012" thrown around in the media as a young man as the year that the house of financial cards was to come tumbling down. Those that spend enough time each day to just scan the headlines provided on Freedom's Phoenix' news site can't miss the trend. The collective wealth of every individual in 'the system' is having their retirement forced pooled so that it can be drained for the benefit of… not you.

This article could have been filled with many examples of how you have been steered away from being able to provide for your own very comfortable retirement. If you did nothing but take whatever financial penalty engineered by every level of government and monthly converted it to Gold and/or Silver, you would have provided for yourself a comfortable retirement. Even with a few weeks until the end of the year, you may still have time to make some moves before… you can't.

But I want to leave you with just a few thoughts that may convince you that you are not informed enough to play the hand you have been dealt, and that you might want to explore the liquidation of any assets denominated in the US Dollar and convert them to something of hard value before it is too late. You may have already got a very small sample of having your dreams taken from you in 2007 and 2008. But I suspect that was just a warning.

My research for this article started with questions for friends with much more experience and intelligence than I in finance. I understood that the entire system was rigged to swindle me out of my money a long time ago. And since I have few monetary resources, I focus on relationships, knowledge, family, security, food, location, and silver to provide for myself and those I care about. My intent was to have my research for this article focus on what to expect in the coming year, and if there were some important pieces of advice that could be put into action in the last few weeks of the year that would be appreciated by our subscribers.

Freedom's Phoenix, the radio show, and this e-Zine are full of regular suggestions and information that is provided by those that deserve your attention, but one last piece of information from me might make a great deal of difference to someone that needed the extra encouragement to do something that might have a very large and beneficial impact on their future.

While on the phone to a friend with extensive experience in matters of finance, another friend stopped by to drop off some holiday cheer and say hello - Charles Goyette, author of the New York Times best-selling book, The Dollar Meltdown. I allowed myself to believe that this was a good sign that I had chosen a good issue to prompt the writing of this article. I'm sure that Charles was worried that a 15 minute visit over the holidays would turn into hours if he couldn't simply supply me with a simple key to the rabbit hole and send me down it on my own, and we'll see him and his wife Ali this Saturday at our Christmas Party anyway… Yes, our family calls it a "Christmas Party" :) So I didn't attempt to chain him to a chair. The key he supplied me was "rehypothecation'".

I had already started taking notes about all of the things that I wanted to research and share my perspective on, but I chose to tell you the above story about the inspiration of this month's cover and my opinion about the use of 'movement manipulation' via the Internet and social media because I think it more relevant and revealing (at least as to how my opinions were formed).

My list included many things to talk about that now seem just a symptom of a much larger problem rather than causes. My list included things like the Presidential Working Group on Financial Markets (The Plunge Protection Team) and the large percentage of stock market volume that their efforts represent; that the volume of stock market activity in general has rapidly declined; what entities do make up the largest portions of stock trading and how much of that is done automatically by computers and how another May 2010 computer trading stock crash is easy to predict and what it might trigger, and what is the safest thing to do to avoid the potential elimination of everything accumulated over a lifetime.

But then I decided to tell you a story that would end with these final thoughts. In August of 2010, Goldman Sachs advised their clients to sell their gold holdings at less than $1250 an ounce http://www.zerohedge.com/article/goldman-tells-its-special-clients-sell-gold-even-it-raises-its-price-target-shiny-metal, and just this week Goldman has repeated this advice http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-05/golden-showers-goldman-tells-clients-sell-gold with Gold now at $1700+. This information sparked a memory of my making a video of over half a dozen women making signs in my backyard during the 2008 election cycle. I thought it interesting to find only woman making signs this particular day when I came home, and thought it appropriate to make a video. One of the signs being produced stated, "The FED Did It", which included a dollar sign and an arrow pointing down. The impression, of course, was that the Federal Reserve was devaluing the dollar. On camera I asked Renee, "What did the Fed do?". Without hesitation she said, "They printed money and bought Gold with it". I was left speechless at the clarity of that simple statement.

There may need to be a couple of steps in the process of 'Printing Gold' via public relation efforts, bailouts, stimulus and client advice, but in the end it is 'the system' that allows for the creation of a debt for unborn children to be converted into hard assets for They/Them/Those. I could also spend a lot of time expressing my concern that Auditing the Gold held by the United States government wouldn't tell us how many times that Gold has been used to leverage other "investments". Just as they have been able to turn paper into Gold, I am just as concerned that the 'People's Gold' has been turned into paper.

I'm sure most of you remember the collapse of MF Global and the 'evaporation' of their client's assets. Gerald Celente was very animated on my radio show (and many others) about the 'theft' of his money by MF Global, and Gerald targeted a great deal of his venom at MF Global's CEO, Jon Corzine. But I hope Gerald won't mind too much that I use his experience as an example for the rest of us. (More about that in just a bit)

Generation Next's skepticism about participating in the financial system is due to a much more powerful force than what can be exerted by government mandates and incentives… culture.

The South Park Episode "HUMANCENTiPAD" http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e01-humancentipad (starting at 1 minute and 45 seconds into the episode will get to the meat of what I hope to share, but I recommend the entire episode for entertainment) the creators of South Park do a great job of making the point that I hope to impart in the summation of this article. Few of us actually read the "Agreements" that are a condition of our updating software. Even if we did read the lengthy agreements, they are in a constant state of flux and often we agree (with a checked box) to have the conditions we agree to altered at any time. Just this past week, Facebook announced that they will automatically upload your smartphone's photos to your Facebook accounts, but have individuals read what happens to those photos and how they are used and who ultimately owns them?... But I bet that they checked the box anyway. http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/11/30/facebook-now-auto-uploads-mobile-photos-to-web/

MF Global:

Jon Corzine's bio is as follows: Mr. Corzine was the CEO of Goldman Sachs from '94-'99 and was followed by Henry Paulson (Paulson would later become Bush's Treasury Secretary). Corzine would then become New Jersey's US Senator from '01-'06 immediately followed by his term as New Jersey's Governor until 2010 when he became CEO of MF Global. And it was MF Global, headed by Mr. Corzine, that Gerald Celente and many others used to leverage their money in the purchase of Gold futures contracts. Mr. Celente's faith in the system resulted in his making use of a well-established (and politically connected) company to provide him the service he needed to take advantage of the anticipated increase in Gold's future price, in spite of its CEO having such a pedigree,… or maybe because of it, or maybe it simply never occurred to Gerald to be concerned and he simply looked for the best rate. Gerald stated that he planned on taking delivery of his gold when the contract was due, but before he could do that, the money he placed in the care of MF Global was gone. Are you more informed than Gerald? Maybe. But I wouldn't bet my life savings on it.

What Charles Goyette pointed me to was a concept that I have never heard of before. But it doesn't surprise me. Governments have been used to robbing as many people as possible since… well, since there have been governments. And this is the point that I've been building up to.

The financial system has evolved into a complicated and constantly changing labyrinth of rules and regulations to protect those that have the greatest influence in the altering of the rules and regulations.

Hypothecation is when a borrower retains ownership of collateral, but it is "hypothetically" controlled by the creditor that has the right to seize possession if the borrower defaults.

Rehypothecation is when the creditor uses the collateral of their clients as collateral for their own trading. MF Global was limited to leveraging their client's money to 140% (amazing) by US law. But if they used a UK subsidiary of MF Global to trade in their own plays on many of the EU's high yield high risk sovereign debt, then there was NO LIMIT to the leveraging. When the European Union didn't act fast enough to bailout their member states as anticipated by the suits at MF Global, the money went bye bye.

I discovered that some more informed and skeptical Hedge Funds knew to take lower returns in exchange for not allowing for the 'rehypothetication' of their assets. But their money is gone as well, and its unlikely retrieval will likely be costly and time consuming.

In July of 2010, an IMF working paper was made available explaining the enormity of this practice.

This paper examines the sizable role of rehypothecation in the shadow banking system. Rehypothecation is the practice that allows collateral posted by, say, a hedge fund to its prime broker to be used again as collateral by that prime broker for its own funding. In the United Kingdom, such use of a customer's assets by a prime broker can be for an unlimited amount of the customer's assets while in the United States rehypothecation is capped (at 140% of their client's assets BTW :). Incorporating estimates for rehypothecation (and the associated re-use of collateral) in the recent crisis indicates that the collapse in non-bank funding to banks was sizable. We show that the shadow banking system was at least 50 percent bigger than documented so far. We also provide estimates from the hedge fund industry for the "churning" factor or re-use of collateral. From a policy angle, supervisors of large banks that report on a global consolidated basis may need to enhance their understanding of the off-balance sheet funding that these banks receive via rehypothecation from other jurisdictions.

Soooo, my point is this. The politics of War, Finance, Power and Control cannot be fully understood by even the smartest of us, and I can only advocate for the physical control of hard assets to retain the bulk of your wealth. You are not going to outsmart such a corrupt system for any length of time, and the end game has already been planned for. Every crisis, disaster, and threat has been used to herd us into the slaughter house where we are to be processed as livestock.

But in spite of all of the evidence of the collapse of our financial and political systems, I am very optimistic. Generation Next is rediscovering the benefits of liberty. Instant communication of truth and ideas has provided the transparency and understanding that has been promised humanity for millennia. The best is yet to come. Our mission is to keep breathing in and out long enough to experience it.